23 March 2014

A miscellany of colour woodcuts (before 1930)

Walter J. Phillips (1884-1963) was my introduction to colour woodcuts, encountered at the Bow Museum in Calgary. He had moved to Canada from Scotland, and was able to make a living through his art even during the Depression. See his oeuvre at sharecom.ca/phillips/ and read his "The technique of the colour woodcut" (1926) here.

New to me in this technical niche is George Scott Ingles, encountered serendipitously online at the excellent "Modern Printmakers" blog (from which most of these images are borrowed). He too came from Scotland, graduating from the Royal College (in London) in 1900. A teacher, mostly at the Leicester School of Art, he started making woodcuts in his 50s, exhibiting them 1927-30. His output is not huge.

"The Coach" by Kenneth Broad is based on a wooden model he owned (via)

Mabel Royds based some of her woodcuts on her travels in India and Tibet

John Platt taught at the Blackheath School of Art (from 1929) and started making woodcuts in 1916. "The Giant Stride" is seminal (via)

As well as London, Ethel Kirkpatrick made woodcuts of St Ives, Venice, Switzerland...

Often with these artists, no one seems to know when they learned to make colour woodcuts, but they certainly seem to be linked through art schools attended or taught at.

Frank Morley Fletcher (1866-1949) had a successful teaching career based on practical knowledge of woodblock printing in the Japanese manner. He published a handbook, Woodblock Printing, in 1916. His followers became known as "the Anglo-Japanese".

William Nicholson saw some woodblocks in a bookshop in the very early 1890s, the story goes, "planed down a surface of a piece of wood, and set about altering the course of European printmaking with a penknife and a nail." Woodblocks had been used for printing chapbooks - cheap literature; "Nicholson adapted the chapbook style with inventiveness and panache."

Although British interest in colour woodcuts originated in the late 19th century Japonism movement and ukiyo-e woodcuts, this interest - and the technique - wasn't confined to the UK, but affected artists in Europe and the USA.

Campbell Grant studied under Fletcher at Santa Barbara in 1930 and went on
to work as an animator for Walt Disney

Tuesday is Drawing Day - why not join in, wherever you are? Find somewhere that has interesting things - it needn't be a museum, it could be your own home! - and just draw, using whatever media you want. Ask some friends to join you, then have a nice lunch.

The London group has grown to the point where it's getting difficult to find a cafe table large enough, and reluctantly I must say that it is no longer open to new members.

8 August - Docklands, either the architecture or the covered garden or the museum. Meet in the museum cafe for lunch.